The rural people must be assisted against climate change

Climate
change remains one of the most pressing issues across the globe, with Africa
being the most vulnerable continent to its menace.

With
all the efforts, the rural people in The Gambia are still being faced with
numerous climate change problems including food insecurity and unpredictable
rainy season. This signals that more and more resources have to be committed to
help the rural poor such as putting in mitigation and adaptation methods.

The
fact that the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Natural Resources
(MECCNAR) launched a six-year Ecosystem-based Adaptation, we are with the view
that more collaboration is highly needed to deal with climate change in our
generation. The government therefore should encourage private sector and to
individuals to involve in green climate initiatives as a means of boosting the
economy.

This
project came as a result of poverty and environmental degradation resulting in
intensely negative socio-economic effects in The Gambia. Climate variability
and change are exacerbating these effects. Droughts and floods are, for
example, increasingly severe, resulting in reduced agricultural production and
unsustainable extraction of resources from forest ecosystems by rural
households.

The project will help build the
climate-resilience of rural Gambian communities and facilitate the development
of a sustainable natural resource-based 9green) economy by implementing
large-scale EbA within and adjacent to agricultural lands, community-managed
forest reserves and wildlife conservation areas.

The
well-being and progress of human beings towards sustainable development are
vitally dependent upon improving the management of the Earth’s ecosystems to
ensure their conservation and sustainable use.

Moreover
the unsustainable land management practices in the woodlands, savannah,
wetlands and mangroves of the Gambia are reducing supplies of ecosystem goods
and services that underpin the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of rural
Gambians which includes benefits from natural ecosystems as well as from agricultural
landscapes.

Since
the EbA project has been launched in The Gambia, we hope that the project will
bring about positive change on the country’s economic, social and environmental
systems which is frequently increasing from the frequency of intensity in the
occurrence of natural imbalances and climate related disasters on the African
continent at large.

“Climate
change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves
to be a huge priority.”